23/9 dimensional anisotropic scaling of passive admixtures using lidar data of aerosols

Abstract

In buoyancy-driven flows, another dimensional quantity appears in addition to the energy flux. Classically, this leads to the prediction that at large scales, isotropic Bolgiano-Obukhov (BO) scaling can dominate isotropic Kolmogorov scaling. We investigate this in the atmosphere by using state-of-the-art high-powered lidar data. We examine simultaneous horizontal and vertical sections of passive scalar surrogates over the ranges 100 m to 120 km and 3 m to 4.5 km , respectively. Overall, this spans the crucial "mesoscale" and involves nearly 1000 times more data than the largest relevant experiments to date. Rather than a transition from one isotropic regime to another, we find that the two regimes always coexist in an anisotropic Corrsin-Obukhov law with the Kolmogorov holding in the horizontal, and the BO holding in the vertical. The stratification is quantified by an elliptical dimension D(el) found to be equal to 2.55+/-0.02 . This anisotropic scaling is very close to that predicted by the 23/9 dimensional unified scaling model of the atmosphere and is consistent with observations of the horizontal wind.